Children of the Ghetto eBook

It was of no good discussing it with his wife.
Those two had rather halved their joys than their
sorrows. They had been married forty years and
had never had an intimate moment. Their marriage
had been a matter of contract. Forty years ago,
in Poland, Mendel Hyams had awoke one morning to find
a face he had never seen before on the pillow beside
his. Not even on the wedding-day had he been allowed
a glimpse of his bride’s countenance. That
was the custom of the country and the time. Beenah
bore her husband four children, of whom the elder two
died; but the marriage did not beget affection, often
the inverse offspring of such unions. Beenah
was a dutiful housewife and Mendel Hyams supported
her faithfully so long as his children would let him.
Love never flew out of the window for he was never
in the house. They did not talk to each other
much. Beenah did the housework unaided by the
sprig of a servant who was engaged to satisfy the
neighbors. In his enforced idleness Mendel fell
back on his religion, almost a profession in itself.
They were a silent couple.

At sixty there is not much chance of a forty year
old silence being broken on this side of the grave.
So far as his personal happiness was concerned, Mendel
had only one hope left in the world—­to die
in Jerusalem. His feeling for Jerusalem was unique.
All the hunted Jew in him combined with all the battered
man to transfigure Zion with the splendor of sacred
dreams and girdle it with the rainbows that are builded
of bitter tears. And with it all a dread that
if he were buried elsewhere, when the last trump sounded
he would have to roll under the earth and under the
sea to Jerusalem, the rendezvous of resurrection.

Every year at the Passover table he gave his hope
voice: “Next year in Jerusalem.”
In her deepest soul Miriam echoed this wish of his.
She felt she could like him better at a distance.
Beenah Hyams had only one hope left in the world—­to
die.

CHAPTER XI.

THE PURIM BALL.

Sam Levine duly returned for the Purim ball.
Malka was away and so it was safe to arrive on the
Sabbath. Sam and Leah called for Hannah in a
cab, for the pavements were unfavorable to dancing
shoes, and the three drove to the “Club,”
which was not a sixth of a mile off.

“The Club” was the People’s Palace
of the Ghetto; but that it did not reach the bed-rock
of the inhabitants was sufficiently evident from the
fact that its language was English. The very lowest
stratum was of secondary formation—­the
children of immigrants—­while the highest
touched the lower middle-class, on the mere fringes
of the Ghetto. It was a happy place where young
men and maidens met on equal terms and similar subscriptions,
where billiards and flirtations and concerts and laughter
and gay gossip were always on, and lemonade and cakes
never off; a heaven where marriages were made, books
borrowed and newspapers read. Muscular Judaism